Rowhouse Logic - Breathtaking Inanity

An unanswerable question for the time being to be sure, but this take by one of Sully’s readers is more way fun than a pogo stick. Enjoy.

Like the writer, I’ve been thinking about the baseball analogy all night. The pitch to the head is such a willfully brutal and violent picture to paint. But what, if anything, to make of it? I’m really quite perplexed. Was this just overly dramatic narrative, or was Fitzgerald telegraphing something? I’ll go with drama until I know better. Then again, that was fairly violent imagery coming from a man who doesn’t appear to be inclined towards drama.

All the world’s a question, though none for me to drink.

It’s pretty cool that Fitzmas came on my birthday, and the initial joy of Fitzmas did indeed take some of the edge of off hitting one of those nasty milestone changes in the number that comes before “something.” The funny thing is that this really wasn’t all that satisfying, at least after the first rush of euphoria, or what passes for euphoria when you’re stuck in a cubicle. I expected the indictments, or the lack thereof to be clarifying, but if anything, I have more questions today than I did yesterday.

I’ll get into some of my questions at a later date. Right now, I’m off to Chinatown to gorge myself on some Peking Duck and a few too many drinks.

I don’t know what the hell ever happened to Albert to fuck up his ability to enjoy the good things in life, but since he’s a good guy, I want to try and help him out a little. A very cold and very hard rain at the end of a very hot Summer is nothing if not a good thing. If you don’t enjoy it you’ve probably spend way too much time around highly enriched uranium or huffing glue out of a sandwich bag. In Albert’s case, the woeful madness probably has something to do with staring through a camera lens for hours on end, though that’s still no excuse. If you ever see him, be sure to let him know that a cold rain in October is a good thing, whereas a cold, driving rain in April is a real fucker through and through.

Now you know, and knowing is half the battle .

I’ve never really found much use for Tweety, but I’ll admit to tuning into Hardball from time to time just so I can soak up some of the great moments in punditry that show regularly features. It’s something like eating lobster for me - I know I don’t really like it, but I still do it once a year just to see if I was wrong the last time I blew $48 for the pleasure of eating a giant aquatic bug dipped in butter. Sadly, I’m often wrong and usually broke, but whatever.

Tonight, the theme of nearly half of Tweety’s questions dealt with his curiosity about why on earth the administration, and specifically the office of the Vice President, would fuck up as badly as is implied in today’s New York Times piece. Why would they screw up so badly, and perhaps criminally, to try and throw a little misguided shit at Joe Wilson?

That’s an easy question to answer, however, and I’m shocked that none of the ‘great minds’ Matthews features on his show managed to spit it out. The answer is that, unlike quite a good deal of the press and punditry, the Bush administration didn’t buy its own bullshit. Okay, they may have bought into the bullshit about creating democracy though extreme violence and no planning, but the bullshit about mushroom clouds they used to sell the war, well that’s another story altogether.

(Let’s do a rhyme: Had their basis for war been legit, about Joe Wilson they would not give a shit.)

Anyway, this is a distinct improvement over Tweety’s routine from last week when he was pushing the line that leaking Plame’s name was reasonable in the context that her husband had said something bad about the administration and the administration’s boner for the war. If Fitzmass is to be as lovely and indictment lined as many of us hope, I imagine that is a line of reasoning we’ll hear quite a bit of in the weeks and months to come - they had to do it, this guy was trashing them. I call it the Jenny Jones defense because the very idea of that type of reasoning brings to the fore the image of some dumb as a rock teenager explaining his repeated acts of violence with the explanation that his victims looked at him funny.

“Motherfucker looked at me sideways so I fucked him up.”

Back in their heyday, that was the fear that Jenny, Jerry, Montel and Sally Jesse were pushing, right? Whether it was your own children, your neighbors, or some random freak in the car next to you, somebody was going to kill you because you looked at them the wrong way. Not such a good defense when you and your party control the most powerful nation the world has ever known and could easily prove your critics wrong with conclusive evidence. Then again, that evidence would have to exist.

Oops.

So what would Jenny do with such a freakish display of destructive behavior? You know it! Boot Camp Baby! Scare those whiney little unwashed shits straight damnit! Woot Woot Woot!

As if.

Beyond the fearful thought of boot camp for the troubled adolescent children of negligent parents, we should also consider the rational response to some of the odd arguments we are likely to hear should indictments indeed fly. While the subtext of the irrational rationale for the Iraq war is extraordinarily compelling to all of us, it will not always be pertinent to the second day of Fritzmas.

I write that because Joe Wilson could have claimed something demonstrably false and it wouldn’t make a even a bit of difference with regards to the legality of the actions the administration, or some of its members, took against his wife. Had Wilson claimed that President Bush himself had engaged in intimate acts with the entire Nigerian rugby squad while injecting massive quantities of bovine growth hormones and Methadrine into his veins, it wouldn’t make even a bit of difference. There are reputable and legal ways to pursue false claims against public figures and none of them involve outing CIA agents, even if you don’t much care for their loved ones.

Of course it does help if those ‘false’ claims were actualy false and you have the facts on your side. I suppose all of us already knew that.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.

Deleium Noel, Brewed by Huyghe Brewery in Melle/Ghent, Belgium.

I try to avoid doing the same beer twice, but with Fitzmas coming any day, now is as good a time as any to break out the wonderfully tasty Delirium Noel. At 10% ABV Delirium Noel is sure to add cheer to any indictment party and, yes, those are flying pink elephants pulling Santa’s Sleigh.

My favorite part about Fitzmas is that almost nobody really knows anything at all, so anything is possible. I’m hoping for treason myself. Sure, that’s a bit like hoping to get a Porsche for Christmas, but what the hell? Happy Fitzmas everybody! Let’s hope it doesn’t rain.

Speaking of the jump, if you’ve never seen the human impact crater left in the pavement as the result of a jump from somewhere north of 20 stories, you’ve probably never really felt real horror at the thought of the combination of gravity and mental illness. Then again, maybe I’m being regional. Whatever.

…more than a few years ago I had a close friend who lived on the 23rd floor of the Chancellor Building on south 13th street in Philadelphia. I used to spend quite a lot of time there as we went to two different schools together and liked playing computer games until about five or six in the morning while polishing off a carton of menthol cigarettes and a bottle of Merlot………….Ah, to be young,

Anyway, one early Sunday afternoon we were accompanied in the elevator by two young, bright faced crime scene investigators. They stood out from the shabby mass in their dark blue, polythene jackets - their position in the police department emblazoned in two inch high letters on their backs.

That they were the two happiest sad people I think I’ve ever seen is what really sticks, however. Their cruel jokes and toothy grins still strike me as the most awful sort of gallows humor I’ve ever seen. It was not the humor of the condemned or the executioner, but rather the humor of the spectator forced to watch in order to maintain their station. Laughing to maintain.

Somewhere around the 15th floor either my friend or I (probably him) got up the nerve to ask what was going on. They giggled something fierce, but as it as it turned out, his next door neighbor had ‘cratered’ in the alley of his own volition. They were called in to gawk at the ‘cratered’ corpse, which landed in some filth next to a dumpster, and to make sure that nobody got pushed.

Nobody did.

Happens all the time.

Look up.

The story:

With a federal corruption probe closing in on him, City Councilman Rick Mariano climbed to the base of the William Penn statue atop City Hall this afternoon, and was talked down after emergency vehicles responded to a possible suicide attempt.

But at a news conference late last night, authorities said that Mariano had never been in danger because the observation deck at the base - about 500 feet above the ground - is encased in protective Plexiglas.

Both Mayor Street and Police Commissioner Sylvester M. Johnson said they did not believe Mariano, who expects to be indicted next week, had been suicidal.

“He just really wanted an opportunity to reflect on all of it,” said Street, who talked to Mariano before he came off the deck shortly after 6 p.m. “He just went to a place where he thought he would be able to be peaceful. . . . It never occurred to me that he was on the verge of taking his own life.”

Mariano was taken to Pennsylvania Hospital, with his wife, Susan, by his side.

Johnson acknowledged that Mariano had voluntarily admitted himself for observation.

The twilight drama capped a day of emotion in which he had earlier commented that he wished a bus would run over him. At a morning news conference, he discussed the federal probe, suggesting federal authorities targeted him because he is from a blue-collar background.

He then attended a City Council meeting and met with his lawyer before going to the deck sometime after 4 p.m.

Mariano has been the target of a federal grand jury investigation into whether businesses in his district paid his credit card bills in exchange for favors. Pressure had been mounting on the councilman; his face was on the cover of Wednesday’s Philadelphia Daily News with a banner headline that read: “Going Down.”

This article does a fairly decent job of pointing out something obvious to anybody who has ever been on Philadelphia City Hall’s observation deck - there is no way in hell for a person who isn’t carrying a weapon or a bottle of Drano to kill themselves up there. Had you seen this event play out on television, or heard it on news radio, you would imagine that the only thing standing between Mr. Mariano and the pavement was some brief glimmer of reason or the grace of god.

That simply wasn’t the case. The observation deck, like nearly every observation deck on the face of our fair planet, is a large zoo enclosure in the sky, where gawking humans are on the inside with only rising air pollution to take note of them. Once you are in, there is no way out save the elevator.

While I’ve never thought much of Mariano and it’s a damn good bet that the feds have him dead to rights, I still imagine him to be smart enough to know that the observation deck is no place for suicide. Anybody with a even a spec of reason within the local broadcast media surely knew the same, though they certainly didn’t report it at the time. Something else was up. Whether it was a very pathetic cry for help or a thoughtful gaze at the gates of a self inflicted hell we’ll probably never know, unless, god forbid, he is featured in a mini-series.

Anyway, I hope Mr. Mariano finds peace. Clearly, today was not his best. Only time and a trial will tell us if it was his worst.

What if our nation gathered together to demand with one voice that a single man regrow his fabulous mustache? Maybe I’m just too idealistic, but I think only good things can come from this petition. Please take the time to sign.

Oh. Hi there. I’ll be with you in a minute.

I can’t get thoughts about trust fund babies on month long coke binges in Miami and oh shit moments out of my head. I’m not sure why. No, that’s a lie. I know why, I just can’t seem to get coherent and write something useful that ties it all together. Whatever. I hope all is going well with you bastards.

As a side note, I’m really enjoying the oh shit moment we’ve been watching play out over the Miers nomination. If you’re not familiar with the oh shit moment, it’s that really painful moment you want back right after you’ve done something unbelievably stupid, like putting your whole arm into a running woodchipper to try and grab the lit cigarette you just dropped into the hopper.

And just to be clear, I know it’s not the Administration that’s having the moment - the moment belongs to movement conservatism. That “oh shit” we’re hearing has something to do with the jarring realization, for some, that they have spent a lot of money, time and effort to put a trust fund baby in charge of their own country – a harsh reality to be sure. Why this sudden exclamation of “oh shit” didn’t come at a more opportune moment is a mystery that may not be solved in our lifetimes. For now I’m blaming it on solar flares.

Hi again. Getting back into this is going to be a pretty slow process, so bear with me. I thought I should give you something of an explanation for why I’ve disappeared so long. A little over a month ago I quit smoking (again) with the aid of a doctor, who has me on every sort smoking cessation drug known to man - patches, nasal spray, gum and all sorts of wonderful pills. Nothing but giggles.

Anyway, something I didn’t really anticipate was that I would go batshit crazy. No, that’s a lie - I just didn’t anticipate just how batshit batshit crazy I would get. As I said, nothing but giggles. I’m told it’s a normal reaction to this sort of thing. Whatever, I’m beginning to feel a little more like myself again, so I should resume writing crappy posts in short (not that short) order.

As far as ice cream goes, I really don’t like it. I’ve never known anybody not to be just shocked when I tell them that. Whatever.

I don’t own any figurines of the Virgin Mary myself, but I believe that there may be one in the family, so I can neither confirm nor deny.

Carry on.

I’ll be with you in just a bit. I promise. You see, there was something of a mix up at the Bureau of Blog Reclamation yesterday. Under the advise of my attorney, I really can’t go into details, but I will say that there was a lot of screaming and shoving and general histrionics. Let’s just say that I made it home just fine, but the blog was sent to either Nebraska or Cuba. Now that I’ve filled out the proper 8721-Z form and filed it in triplicate, I imagine I’ll be seeing the blog home any day now. Real soon. I promise.